Tableau Channel Chief Out As Company Combines Partner Program With MuleSoft, Salesforce

‘The real benefit is the ability to understand how all of the (Salesforce Customer) 360 products work together,’ MuleSoft channel chief Dan McAllister says.

Julie Bennani

Salesforce subsidiaries Tableau and MuleSoft will combine their partner programs with their parent organization starting Feb. 1, CRN has learned. And while MuleSoft channel chief Dan McAllister is staying on board, Tableau channel chief Julie Bennani is no longer with the company.

Bringing the MuleSoft and Tableau programs together under San Francisco-based Salesforce will give partners one contract and one partner portal as opposed to multiple, McAllister told CRN in an interview. It will also help Salesforce as a whole better understand partners’ capabilities and specialties.

“Part of the power of this is we’re going to take those operations teams for standing up three different programs and maintaining them, have them all work on – in this window of time between now and Feb. 1 – onboarding to one common framework,” McAllister said. “And then they will have all this extra horsepower to actually improve it. So it’ll improve because it’s one instead of multiple, and then we‘re actually going to add capabilities to it and more benefits to the organization and the three different parties – us, the customers and the partners – at the same time.”

[RELATED: Salesforce Cuts Guidance, Reports ‘Measured’ Customer Buying Amid Economic Uncertainty]

In a statement, Salesforce confirmed Bennani left the company.

“We appreciate her contributions and wish her the best in the next phase of her journey,” according to the statement. “Julie’s role and responsibilities have been delegated amongst regional Tableau partner leadership. No other key partner leaders have left the company recently.”

Do Salesforce, Tableau and MuleSoft have different partners?

The combined partner program should simplify how partners of one Salesforce subsidiary grow a practice with another subsidiary or with Salesforce’s own marketing and data analytics products, he said. It should in turn help partners deliver a suite of services to customers if appropriate.

“The real benefit is the ability to understand how all of the (Salesforce Customer) 360 products work together,” McAllister said. “In almost every meeting I’m in with our integration partners, in particular, they’re thinking about it in terms of business solutions to the customer.”

Partners who still want to specialize in one Salesforce product or subsidiary can continue to do so, he said.

“We’ll still have very specific enablement around each of the product lines,” he said. “We have to. They have to have those technical skills, and we will have the right support available for them. But the real benefit for them is going to be more individuals with expertise on the interoperability of all the different solutions.”

In a recent interview with CRN, Kevin O’Brien, vice president of performance marketing at Beaverton, Ore.-based Salesforce partner Concentrix Catalyst, said that the company was investing in growing its individual practices with MuleSoft and Tableau but also bringing together various Salesforce products to help customers.

“We’re really excited to see each of those individually grow, but also get really excited when we can pull all of those together in more complex, multi-cloud solutions that we’re putting into place for clients,” O’Brien said.

In March, Slack brought its nascent partner program under the Salesforce umbrella, with Slack channel chief Richard Hasslacher reporting to Salesforce channel chief Tyler Prince.

Salesforce closed on its $27.7 billion Slack acquisition last year. It bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018 and Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019.

Tech Starts To Feel Economy

The combined partner program comes after a tough quarter for Salesforce and other big tech vendors, although McAllister said that the integration has been in the works for awhile, with McAllister moving his organization under Prince’s earlier in the year. Tableau’s employees were also brought in earlier this year, with the combined program going live for partners Feb. 1.

During Salesforce’s latest quarterly earnings in August, the company cut its guidance for the amount of revenue it expects to see for the fiscal year and reported decelerations in Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud during the second quarter of its fiscal year.

Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff said that in the summer, he and his team saw “customers becoming more measured in the way they buy” and sales cycles “get stretched” with deals “inspected by higher levels of management.”

“Nearly everyone I’ve talked to is taking a more measured approach to their business,” he said. “We expect these trends to continue in the near term.”

Salesforce reported $7.72 billion in revenue for the quarter. The company’s data segment, which includes subsidiaries MuleSoft and Tableau, brought in $1 billion in revenue, an increase of 12 percent year over year.

Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor said he was “heartened by the progress we’re seeing in our go-to-market transformation of MuleSoft,” Taylor said. “We are on track to have MuleSoft return to being a tailwind for revenue growth at the back half of the year.”

Salesforce is expected to report its next quarterly earnings this month.

Cloud vendor giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud also raised concerns over the economy in their October earnings reports. And Oracle has reportedly laid off hundreds of employees.

Tableau Channel Chief Out

Meanwhile, Tableau channel chief Julie Bennani – whose formal title has been senior vice president and general manager of worldwide partners and alliances – said on her LinkedIn account that her last day with Tableau was Oct. 17.

CRN has reached out to Bennani for comment.

“Sadly, October 17th was my last day with Tableau\Salesforce,” she wrote. “I’ve been honored to lead the global partner ecosystem for Tableau with an amazing team of senior leaders through what has to be unprecedented change during the acquisition, a pandemic, and all the ways of working change we adjusted to.”

She continued: “A deep thank you to all the Tableau partners across the globe who were part of my time and journey! Your commitment to Tableau is phenomenal and I wish you great success moving forward. Go Data Rockstars!!”

Bennani thanked former Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky – now CEO of Amazon Web Services – among a host of other Tableau and Salesforce employees.

Her post about leaving the company received 122 comments, including ones from Behfar Jahanshahi, CEO of consultancy InterWorks; Stan de Boisset, global vice president of partners at Jumio Corp.; Whitney Myers, CEO of Zuar; and Mark Jewett, chief marketing officer for SmartRecruiters.

Bennani is not the only key Tableau executive to leave this year. Tableau Chief Marketing Officer Jackie Yeaney left the company in August and Tableau Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Americas theater Scott Gibbs left in June, according to their LinkedIn accounts.

Dan Miller, Tableau’s chief revenue officer, wrote on his LinkedIn that he is now an adviser to Salesforce while transitioning out of the company.